I had a falling out with my previous hosting provider over the past week. Mediatemple sent me an email, claiming that my sites were eating up too many MySQL resources, and saying my account would automatically be upgraded to their new Grid Container technology. For that unsolicited service, my account would be charged an additional $20/month.
This news sent me into something near a panic attack, for a few reasons: 1) my new classes start in less than a week. All spare energy I have needs to be focussed on getting ready for the fall semester, not working out hosting issues, 2) my sites are labors of love. I can’t justify spending $20 more per month to keep them online, and 3) there’s no way in hell that Bassplaying.com and Wheatdesign.com (my two MySQL-backed sites) eat enough resources to deserve such a charge. I emailed Mediatemple and filed a trouble ticket saying as much. I ran reports on the back-end and found nothing that would warrant such a change (no slow queries, very reasonable MySQL report numbers).
I took (mt) at their word: they said I’d be automatically upgraded in just a few days. So I decided to abandon ship. I already had a hosting account at Dreamhost, which I got at a deep discount and was using to host my jamesnotjim.com site. I had been thinking about closing down my Dreamhost site and moving James, Not Jim over to Mediatemple. But, faced with these unreasonable upcharges, I migrated all of my sites to Dreamhost instead. All that remains now is to flip the switch and Mediatemple, requesting that my account with them be canceled and my two-years of hosting with them come to an end.
After I spent a good deal of my weekend migrating my sites (and not working on my classes), I got a phone call on Monday from someone at Mediatemple, saying the reports were likely based only on a temporary database surge and that I “probably” would not have to be migrated to the more expensive database resources. I appreciate the call, but it changes nothing. So now I’m rolling with Dreamhost. We’ll see how that goes. So far, it’s going just fine.